Hal Holbrook Quotes

[Dwight Eisenhower is] a soldier who doesn't like or want war. It's like a whore who believes in chastity.

There's something in the German language that makes you feel like you're getting a hug and a backstab at the same time.

irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

The best characters are the ones that somehow manage to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time. If you do that, you're at the center of the universe - if you can find characters who are more ambiguous and can raise more questions than answers.

Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.

In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.

Marilyn Manson is a criticism of gimmickry, while being itself a gimmick.

Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.

I like characters who are contradictory.

It's just something that's sort of funny, sort of not.

Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.

Being human is being a lot of things at the same time.

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

In contradiction and paradox, you can find truth.

As a reader and a writer, I'm happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.